Even though I have mentioned Anderson Cooper’s maddeningly, intense coverage of everything large and small, he did save my life once although we have never met. 

This episode happened a little over a year ago.  I was having a really bad day at work.  Everything that could go wrong did, in fact, go wrong.  There was an enormous amount of colleague in-fighting, and nasty in-fighting at that.  And, everyone came to me to settle the arguments and assess responsibility.  All that meant was that everyone then blamed me.  My son was having issues at school and I had to meet with the principal.  A dear friend of the family was falling faster into the swirl of dementia and I was part of the “first response team”.  The economy and my business were under severe pressure — showing the signs of the great crash that was coming. 

I was scared and I was tired and I felt a little hopeless, and everything started to boil over.  I understood in that moment that normal, ordinary people can fall off a cliff.   But I stopped and thought about how this would play on the 24-hour news cycle:  a panel of experts — white, gay and Jewish — would be disowning me as not white (someone would figure out something), not gay (because I was once engaged to a man) and not Jewish (reform, shreform) while another panel of experts — NRA supporters and ultra-right — would look into my background pointing to all the ways that, had I followed, their doctrine, I would have been ok.  And then there is the blogging through commercials.  So, I decided that I could not put my beloved family through that circus and I left the office and worked from home the rest of the day.  And that is how Anderson Cooper saved my life.